When you get right down to it, there really aren't any big "villains" in Mass Effect. Antagonists, sure, but nobody is doing anything terrible just for the sake of being evil or even for self interest. And I'm fine with that.

Saren may have been a dangerous arsehole even before he was a reaper puppet, but most of what he does is for the greater good as he sees it. Same goes for Benezia, the Shadow Broker and TIM, more or less. The Collectors were just highly developed husks under reaper control. The Reapers themselves are little more than tools and extensions of the catalyst, which is just fulfilling it's function in the best way it knows how. Even the Leviathans that created it were acting out of concern for their thralls and were simply the victims of their own hubris.

Actually, the closest thing the game has to a villain is Wreave, and he's technically an ally!

Looking at things from TIM's perspective, he had two choices if he wanted to stop the Reapers. He could work with the Alliance on the Crucible project, but nobody knows what that is or how it works. It could backfire, or just plain not work at all. It's a galactic Hail Mary born out of desperation with absolutely no guarantee of success. Meanwhile, Henry Lawson's lab is achieving promising results in controlling Reaper tech, and given more time there is a chance that they can scale that up to take control of actual Reapers. It's a desperate hope too, but at least there's actual science going into the project and not wishes and prayers. Knowing what TIM knows, it makes sense that he would pursue the option of control.

Click to expand...

Plus TIM seems to be looking beyond the war with the Reapers and how useful control of their technology would be to securing human dominance of the galaxy, so thats another reason controlling them probably appealed to him, heck thats probably the tract the Reapers used while indoctrinating him.

Plus TIM seems to be looking beyond the war with the Reapers and how useful control of their technology would be to securing human dominance of the galaxy, so thats another reason controlling them probably appealed to him, heck thats probably the tract the Reapers used while indoctrinating him.

Click to expand...

Does anybody remember the dead Reaper in Mass Effect 2? The one that was technically "dead"? That dead Reaper was able to indoctrinate all of the Ceberus scientists and turn them into husks. And TIM decides for no freaking reason that his next step should be to control the Reapers. No plan, no strategy, no anything. That's his plan and he's going for it. He's declared war on the whole galaxy to control something that is killing his science teams and soldiers in masse because... he wants to?

The Mass Effect artbook detailed TIM to be an endgame boss fight. It was scrapped because they wanted TIM's "intelligence" to be his weapon, not his strength. How the heck does TIM have Intelligence if he's indoctrinated and has stupid goals?

Plus TIM seems to be looking beyond the war with the Reapers and how useful control of their technology would be to securing human dominance of the galaxy, so thats another reason controlling them probably appealed to him, heck thats probably the tract the Reapers used while indoctrinating him.

Click to expand...

Does anybody remember the dead Reaper in Mass Effect 2? The one that was technically "dead"? That dead Reaper was able to indoctrinate all of the Ceberus scientists and turn them into husks. And TIM decides for no freaking reason that his next step should be to control the Reapers. No plan, no strategy, no anything. That's his plan and he's going for it. He's declared war on the whole galaxy to control something that is killing his science teams and soldiers in masse because... he wants to?

Click to expand...

As opposed to wanting control of the Collector base which BUILDS Reapers which could also have tech for indoctrination as a fail safe.

I unlocked the Turian Saboteur Engineer the other day and I was rather surprised I was the top scorer in every match I played. You'd think relying almost exclusively on sentry turret and sabotage wouldn't accomplish that, and yet...

Can't wait to reach ME3 on my current single player engineer. The first time I took an engineer through ME3 I guess I didn't realize you could hack Cerberus turrets and even atlases. Going to do insanity for the first time (previously did ME2 insanity on another engineer) so I can take full advantage of my sentry turret, drones, and hacking. Stuff dies too fast on normal for those to ever be of any use. Finished ME3 on my vanguard the other day and while you kill stuff ridiculously fast, man is it ever boring. Charge-nova-charge-nova-charge-nova zzzzzzz.

I've definitely found Engineers to be fun, though it's a class I haven't done in single-player yet (probably will be the last actually). But the Quarian Male and N7... err... Grenade-launching-Engineer... have both been a lot of fun. I'm tempted to try the Talon just to see what the Omni-bow is like.

I'm about a quarter of the way though ME3 with my renegade engie right now (which also happens to be my first insanity run.) It is a fun class, but requires a whole other mindset to play effectively and I can see why it's by far the least popular class in SP. It's a shame really since to my knowledge, the engie has the *only* class specific dialogue interrupt in the whole saga.

By contrast, I have about two of every other class...except Sentinel. Which is odd as I had a lot of fun with that one too.

I'm about a quarter of the way though ME3 with my renegade engie right now (which also happens to be my first insanity run.) It is a fun class, but requires a whole other mindset to play effectively and I can see why it's by far the least popular class in SP. It's a shame really since to my knowledge, the engie has the *only* class specific dialogue interrupt in the whole saga.

By contrast, I have about two of every other class...except Sentinel. Which is odd as I had a lot of fun with that one too.

Apparently in Omega the engineer gets a paragon interrupt to reroute reactor power immediately to shut down the Cerberus forcefields, rather than having to wait til after all the renegade interrupts. Suck it, Petrovsky!

But yeah, I really wish they had done that sort of thing throughout the series. Outside of how they go about killing stuff, all the classes pretty much experience the games the same way.

^I know, right? It would have made for a much deeper illusion of choice if your class/background/service history were referred to at certain points. They barely even acknowledge it if Shepard is a biotic, which given that cover three of the six classes is one hell of a strange oversight.

Well to be fair, you background and service history do crop up in dialogue every so often, most prevalently in ME1, where you've also got background-exclusive side quests on the Citadel. And the service history adds extra dialogue to other side quests (for example you know Corporal Toombs personally if pick Sole Survivor.) They rarely get acknowledged in ME2, all that springs to mind is in news announcements (Shepard Memorial Plaza on Elysium for instance) and a followup email related to your ME1 background sidequest. There's more references in ME3, obvious one being Liara's holorecording of you (which also *dun-dun-dun!* acknowledges your class.) I also noticed in the archives in Citadel DLC the holo image next to Shepard is different depending on your background (it showed prefab buildings with bodies laying around for my colonist Shepard.) So yeah, lots of references to your background/service history, next to nothing for your class!

Shepard only gets to speak to her/his mother if she/he is a spacer (in ME1 and ME3).

Click to expand...

I remember when Hackett mentioned Shepard's mother was onboard and I was so excited that I thought I would finally be able to either talk to her again or even see her for once! One thing that is never done in these kinds of stories are professional high ranking mother/daughter duos! But instead, all we get is a mention and that's it.

Well, I'm not surprised that we never actually *saw* Shep's mother. Depending on how you created Shepard, the two of you could look totally different. In Dragon Age II the appearance of your mother and siblings changed depending on what skin tone you picked for Hawke, but they weren't going to go through all that trouble just for a minor character like Shep's mom.